Max Rain

 First Time Art Party Participant

All Together Now

Artist’s website

www.maxrain.com

About the Artist

I am currently operating at the intersection of painting and ceramics; my work consists primarily of carefully rendered representational tableaus on clay. Although I have a background in sculpture, I am currently working two-dimensionally in order to eliminate the dialog between form and surface, and instead focus on the clarity of the image. My images are made from pieced together hand-made tiles. In a process more reminiscent of stained glass windows than mosaic, the tile edges tend to follow the borders of figures or objects, creating a significant outline and isolating each individual. 

In my recent work, I depict a figure or multiple figures in an urban setting. The figures present are always enacting something, but it is never exactly clear what it is they are doing. Rather than allegorical, I see a majority of the narratives I create as anecdotes – they are about social dynamics and features of human interaction, but they are not necessarily a piece of a specific puzzle, a representation of a moral lesson, or in service to an obvious greater conclusion. They are individual stories that help explore larger themes such as the paradoxes of parenthood, the difficulty of internalizing tragedy, coming to grips with the aging of relatives, poverty, and our desire for escapism and pleasurable diversions. The situations I create could be outrageously violent occurrences, super clandestine meetings, or nothing at all – merely the everyday space we are used to. I try to make the extraordinary and the routine meet, and while they are not entirely indiscernible, they blend together.